Against “Dominance”: the meaningless word that is bankrupting the Department of Defense
“We have lost the electromagnetic spectrum”
Alan Shaffer, the head of research and engineering at the Department of Defense, told reporters at the National Press Club on Wednesday that the United States has lost “dominance” in the electromagnetic spectrum.
This all begs the question though, what is “electromagnetic dominance,” and did we ever have really have it?
It’s an alarming statement, especially considering the critical role that technologies like GPS, advanced radars and satellite communications play in the preferred American way of war.
Shaffer suggested that it is not so much new technologies that threaten US dominance, as it is the proliferation of cheap disruptive technology- like GPS jammers – to less well-resourced adversaries.
“That’s a huge deal when you think about fielding advanced systems that can be [countered] by a very, very cheap digital jammer,” he said.
It is important to understand that in defense jargon dominance has a very specific meaning. When evaluating air power effectiveness, NATO and the USAF have settled on a tiered system of classification.
Counterintuitively, air superiority is actually the lowest defined tier of airspace control. It is defined as the state of air battle” which permits the conduct of operations by [an air battle force] and its related land, sea and air forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by opposing forces.”
In normal human parlance, pretty good, but not great.
Next up the hierarchy is air supremacy, which is “that degree of air superiority wherein the opposing air force is incapable of effective interference.” So in essence, winning. However, these terms also play a role in structuring acquisition priorities and funding debates. In the congressional context, being against air supremacy is a bit like being against a free buffet for life, it just doesn’t happen.
However, you can’t have too much of a good rhetorical thing, so over the past twenty years a new term has risen – enter air dominance. You can think of air dominance as air superiority uber ales. There a number of masters thesis’s that jump through hoops to define it, but it more or less boils down not only having air superiority, but exploiting it.
Mainly though, I think it can be argued that air dominance is a rhetorical device used to make budget arguments. Just look at this graph I put together that shows the relative instance of “air dominance” in print (using a nifty tool from google) versus overall US defense spending over time.
Note, that this period arguably was when the USAF enjoyed its greatest degree of Air Superiority ever. Yet, defense types began to hone in on an even higher metric of success.
The kicker though, is that most people don’t talk about achieving air dominance, just maintaining it. It is a powerful argument. Humans are risk averse and biased to maintaining the status quo, especially on political questions in areas where they lack expertise.
Which brings us back to our loss of so called “dominance” of the electromagnetic spectrum. What is it? Well, in reasoning by analogy you could say it is achieving an unrivalled qualitative and quantitative advantage in a host of military technologies associated with electromagnetism.
In keeping with the spirit of the moment, we must not forget it needs to be achieved affordably. This people, is why we can’t have nice things. To be charitable, it is a complicated topic and the US military does need to recapitalize in a number of areas in order to meet emerging threats. However, in the interest of rhetorical positioning for short term budget fights, defense types have a tendency of designing dysfunctional programs. It’s how we got crusader, the future combat system and the joint strike fighter.
Affordably trying to achieve the platonic ideal of a thing we never had, because we need it to do what we never did, is usually a recipe for disaster (Freedberg, Breaking Defense, 3/14).
